Windows 10: Windows Defrag schedule / SSD maintenance query

Hi all,

As I posted in another thread (about another issue) a while back, I recently installed an SSD and did a clean install of Windows 10. Being my first experience of using an SSD, I did a lot of reading up on it, mainly about maintenance, such as defragmentation etc, and most reading has told me that generally, you don't need to really do anything - Windows 8 and 10 is built with SSD in mind and TRIM and as such should take care of all of this automatically.

But I noticed that in Windows Defrag (the UI) I have the schedule setting to perform maintenance weekly, as you can see on the screenshot at the bottom (I took this screenshot the other day and have only now got around to posting this) However, note at the top that it says 8 days since last run (and that was by me, manually) So this is obviously over a week. I left it a bit longer, and it still said that it hadn't been run. So when does Windows do this TRIM maintenance? Is it a case of it is doing it and not updating the date info in the defrag app, or is it something I'm going to have to go in and do manually? If it's the latter, how often should I be running this?





Many thanks

:)

 

Windows 10 Upgrade says I have SSD but I have HDD.

I installed Windows 10 and after the upgrade it is reporting my HDD as SSD when I try to run optimize. The task is scheduled but the drive is not available for optimization because Windows thinks it is a SSD.

I was able to run a 3rd party defrag, (38% fragmented!), but would rather use the built in defrag on the scheduled maintenance.

Is there a registry fix or something to report the drive correctly?

 

After KB3163018 & 3149135 Automatic Maintenance Defragments SSD instead of Optimizing

After KB3163018 and KB3149135 were installed, I noticed that manually starting Automatic Maintenance that an SSD is defragmented instead of sending only the trim command to the SSD (optimization).

It's easily verified: just manually start Automatic Maintenance with the Defragment & Optimize Drives GUI open.

You will notice in the GUI that Windows defragments the SSD using multiple passes - Pass 1, Pass 2,...

It's a screw-up...

 

If you click the 'Change settings' button you will see that Windows will notify you only when 3 consecutive runs have been missed. A run could be missed because the PC was not turned on, for example. Wait three weeks and look again. Or set it to 'Daily' if you don't want to wait that long to see if it works *Smile

Oh, and on checking my settings while posting this I noticed that it had inadvertently been set for 'all drives' (I could have sworn I'd set it for C: only, perhaps the AU changed it back). Defrag says all my drives were last run on the 19th November (not by me).

 

TRIM is performed immediately as needed without any indication to the user.

Verify that TRIM is working using this small program from this site:

TRIMcheck: Does Your SSD Really have TRIM Working? | The SSD Review

I've used it for years, it works great, small program that only uses a command prompt window.

edit: defragmentation is not necessary on an SSD

 

Hi,

Glad to see you're happy with it but does not guarantee that TRIM is actually working though.

Cheers, *Wink

 

Yes, it does show whether it's working or not. Try it and see how it works, or go to the site. I've quoted one of their forum members below with an excellent description of how it works and what it does.

 

Hi,

I did try it and read a lot about it too.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads...-tool.2302578/

The program uses heuristics and by the author's own admission, there's no way to be 100% certain of the returned result.
Even the output of the program states ; "TRIM appears to be working"....

Either way, better that than nothing at all, right ?

Cheers, *Wink

 

Sorry about that fdegrove *Redface I saw that too, it appears TRIM is working, to me it's a good sign TRIM is working even with the disclaimer "appears".

You're right, it's not a guarantee, but it beats the heck out of no indicators at all. *Smile

 

Check all your settings and see if they are correct.

 

I have mine turned off. I thought SSD's didn't need to be defragged at all. Is the optimize setting different than defrag? I'm confused.

 

Hi,

No problem at all. The problem is that there's no way of predicting where a file's written on a SSD and so on.
For all practical manners we can safely assume that when TRIM is enabled it also does its job.
There are some more complex issues like optimizing UASP Win To Go drives but that's another topic entirely .

Best, *Wink

 

Hi,

Defragmentation and Optimization:

All drives suffer from files being split into different locations on a drive regardless what type of drive. This can become somewhat cumbersome on typical spinners because the heads need to travel to read these blocks causing latency.
SSDs being so much faster, suffering hardly any latency at all, do not require defragmentation but do require garbage collection, i.e. cells that contain deleted or no longer used information need to be cleared and flagged as clean so these can be rewritten to.
That's what "Optimization" does in Windows on an SSD. When on a HDD it will defrag instead.

While you can defrag an SSD it causes quite a lot of writes on the drive which reduces its life. No big deal as modern SSDs can sustain an enormous amount of writes.
But, given the low inherent latency of these SSDs, why bother ?

Some people claim to never ever defrag their HDDs but instead restore an image of it. While this achieve the same end result it also rewrites everything on their drive instead of just reallocating the fragmented files. Not very disk friendly if you ask me even though they think otherwise....

There's loads of BS on the net so don't believe everything you read but try to understand how SSD and their controllers works. After that, decide what best suits your needs.
I'll be dilapidated for it but, yes, I do defragment SSDs occasionally....

Cheers, *Wink

 

Thanks for the info. I will just leave it turned on and let windows 10 do whatever. It is now set at default so it optimizes the SSD's once a week.

 

I clean installed W10 onto an SSD and can confirm that the weekly schedule doesn't update as expected. I deliberately left it once and found that one partition that stores Macrium images (and so gets filled/deleted/filled/deleted) did eventually auto run after something like 20 days despite the partition being used daily for storing very large files (20Gb at a time plus sets of 0.2 to 2Gb).

I consider it a bug in Windows operation in the same way the system reserved partition always reports as needing optimising.